About that pie chart

By BEN SMITH

04/11/2011 04:38 PM EDT

The political discussion of Planned Parenthood has not exactly been characterized by accuracy, with Senator Jon Kyl setting the standard last week when he said that abortion made up "over 90%" of what the organization does, a line his staff said later was "not intended" to be "factual."

But this chart, which indicates that only 3% of what the group does is perform abortions, also seems to me to overstate the case in the opposite direction, and it got quite a bit of attention , though Andrew Sullivan has now allowed a reader to, a bit, over-correct it by claiming the group is equating each condom distributed with an abortion performed. (Spokesman Tait Sye said handing out condoms isn't included in the chart.)

There are any number of ways to tally this. At the high end, Planned Parenthood's enemies at Live Action peg abortion spending at a third, based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation around internal cost Planned Parenthood doesn't release. The chart above, on the other hand, seems to reflect a decision to make abortions appear as minimal as the organization can plausibly claim -- part of what has been a strategy of painting Republicans as foes not just of abortion, but of contraception.

The underlying Planned Parenthood release offers what strikes me as another reasonable way of looking at it: They say they see more than three million patients a year and perform 332,278 abortions, putting the procedure somewhere a bit north of ten percent of their practice, and a substantial share of the abortions provided nationally. Abortions, along with a few thousand vasectomies, are the only surgical procedures reflected in the chart.

In any event, the House Republican leadership eventually let this fight wait, but both Rep. Mike Pence and Democrats seem to be embracing the fight, with Democrats clearly preferring a debate over abortion - much less birth control -- to one over spending.

CORRECTION: A reader with a background in statistics emails that my numerator and denominator don't jibe, and suggests I phrase my rough estimate thus: "Ten percent of Planned Parenthood's clients received an abortion in addition to their other services."